Goodbye, hiring bias! Why AI is the key to equal employment

Employment News

Jul 3, 2018

As the adage goes, “to err is human.” Mistakes and bias are built into the human condition. We can try our very best to maintain objectivity, but more often than not we allow personal biases to creep into our everyday decision making. While most of the time these biases are harmless, this can become a huge problem when your job is hiring people. Hiring bias is, unfortunately, a real product of the human condition. Something as seemingly innocent as setting up an interview with a candidate just based off the fact that they attended the same high school, or more seriously, refusing someone based off their race or gender, can be problematic–especially in HR. So how can we as professionals prevent this sort of thing from happening?

Prevent hiring discrimination danger zones

AI works off data, meaning you still have the power to crunch the numbers. If you’re worried about bias creeping in, you can set the program to exclude metrics that indicate age, race, or gender. This leaves you with only the pertinent information: experience, skills, capabilities, etc.

According to a recent meta-study compiled by PNAS, hiring discrimination remains mostly unchanged over the past 25 years. Minorities continue to receive 30-50% fewer callbacks than their white counterparts. By and large, fewer callbacks mean fewer offers for Latinx and African-American candidates. No matter how qualified these candidates are on paper, they’re just not being considered as often. As alarming as these stats seem, we do have the means with which to combat the debilitating bias some people face. AI can make sure these candidates don’t fall through the cracks and are considered for qualified positions.

Set up guidelines

We’ve all had that one boss that would drill standards and protocols into our brains until we could recite them in our sleep. As helpful as that was, living in the 21st century definitely has its perks. Just make tech do it!

You can quickly tell a program to follow specific guidelines and guarantee it will listen better than an intern. Let’s say you want to make sure you and your team follow the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines. With an AI program, you can easily enter EEOC values to process applications. The result is a batch of qualified candidates that hit all the marks and follow all the rules.

Streamline the interview process

The interview is still one of the most essential aspects of the hiring process. A face-to-face conversation remains a time-tested standard for hiring teams. If you’re a veteran interviewer, then you are keenly aware of the question-related pitfalls to avoid. But can you say the same for the rest of your team? This is where AI can jump in to help.

You’ve screened your candidate using AI; now it’s your turn! AI programs like Ansaro can allow you and your team to collaborate on proper, non-biased interview questions to ask against a grading system that you create. A pre-prepped interviewer can then grade candidates on a fairer scale.

The interview may be a staple on the road to hiring, but how you prepare for one is evolving. Hiring discrimination has been a problem for decades across various industries and workplaces. Utilizing technological advancements to end this issue is exactly what tech should do: improve our lives for the better.